Fish-Eye News

February 2017

"A Small Treatise on Darkness," a new chapbook with illustrations by Raz Ben Ari, has been printed and bound. You can listen to the poem here:

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July 2015

"Everything Is Broken" is now in the Rattle audio archive. You can hear me read
it here.

June 2014

My poem "Everything Is Broken" was a semi-finalist in the Rattle Poetry Contest, where it placed in the top twenty poems out of more
than 8000 entries. It appears in the Summer 2014 issue of Rattle as well as in the audio archive.

My translation of "The Jewish Fishermen of Salonika" by Baruch Uziel has, at long last, been printed. Here you can see it
resting in the book cradle before binding. This project was generously supported by The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York and
includes illustrations by Lior Clop (Schiller).

May 2014

Follow this link to hear me read poems on You Tube, with other members
of the Israel Association of Writers in English.

January 2012

Freshly minted type, finally ransomed from customs. Purchased from the lovely people at
M&H Type in San Francisco.

December 2011

I found this proof press hidden in the corner of a shop in Jaffa flea market. I was fortunate enough to be in the company of
two Goju Ryu blackbelts (Dan 7 and Dan 5), who kindly transported it to the car. We have devised an
adjustable chase and magnetic gripper system for this press. I used it to print the artwork for my chapbook, Bad News.

My old poem "Even Our Trees Fight" appears in the most recent issue of Phatitude,
"Bridging the Cultural Divide:Remembering September 11th."

Bad News: A Poem by Sharon Kessler (and a new book, by that name). Accordian binding. Illustrations by Noga Farchi printed from
photopolymer plates, with silkscreened cover art by Nahum Farchi.

My new project, The Jewish Fishermen of Salonika, has been launched. The original Hebrew essay, published in 1961 by Baruch Uziel, describes
the lives and work of Jews who worked for generations in the maritime trades until the destruction of the Jewish community of
Salonika (Thessalonika) during the Second World War.
The writer, a lawyer and Knesset member, was my husband's maternal grandfather, and we found his essay on this little-known chapter of
Jewish history among my mother-in-law's papers after her death. Virtually no information on this subject is available in English, and
the information in Hebrew appears in obscure sources. The essay, in my translation, will be published (if I can ever get my type out of customs, where
it is being held prisoner) as a hand-set
chapbook in an edition of 100 and will also appear in a special section of my Web site devoted to this project. This project
was made possible by the generous support of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

My son, Nahum Farchi, whose artwork you see on this site, won the judge's prize for local artists in a contest run by
our local newspaper, Hagefen, for his painting, Field #1. The winning paintings are on
exhibit through the end of January in the Gallerina art gallery/cafe in the village of Bat Shlomo.
Nahum also has a permanent
online gallery of his work.

Summer 2010

Over the summer I studied silkscreening with the inimitable Shoshana Shpinner, proprietor of
Oscar Haifa Art Printers. Here you can see me working on
Blue Heron.

May 2010

My new chapbook, 3 New Mexico Poems, has been printed in an edition of 50.

November/December 2009

My brother Steve, proprietor of our NYC premises, ties his own fishing flies. This one is called a humpy.

My dear friend, the writer Patricia Klindienst, author of the beautiful book The Earth Knows My Name, accompanies me
to the Poet's House at their new location in lower Manhattan, where we donated 2 copies of "Trees" to the library.